Even so, she could be enthralled now by these pictures, seen again after three months of separation. The sky in the pictures, Hugh imagined, was actual Bermuda sky to Ariel, and the sea, the ocean curling her own home beach. The light was dear as her life, home light. She stood, embraced by shore and sky and wave.
And her own figure up there, dancing in light and shade,—what of that? It was the word of her father’s love for her. It was merely his voice saying with the easiness of complete sincerity, “my darling.” And in all the pictures around the walls the artist’s love echoed itself in the dancing figure.
So Hugh dreamed, standing near the entrance door and himself neglecting the paintings to concentrate upon a girl of flesh and blood.
It seemed odd to him that nobody in the crowds which were drifting even this early in the afternoon through the gallery recognized Ariel as the dancer of the pictures. Obviously nobody did. If she should take off her hat, though, if the May sunlight should fall on her pewtery hair, would they then see? Or was she so rapt away into companionship with her dead father and his imagination that she had attained a kind of invisibility, except for those who loved her?
Glenn and Anne kept together in their tour of the walls. Before “Noon,” given the place of honor—the only painting on one whole expanse of wall at the farthest end of the gallery—they stopped the longest. “Think of this being in our attic, just lying there in cobwebs and dust, for the past five years!” Glenn muttered. “Hugh hasn’t a touch of taste, of course—he’s the typical Philistine if there ever was one—but it does seem as if even the Tired Business Man might have an uneasy feeling—a sense that there was something, even if he couldn’t grasp it, in the very presence of a thing like this!”
“Oh, be careful!” Anne whispered, pinching his arm and, with apparent casualness but real concern, glancing around them to see if any one had overheard Glenn’s mutterings.
Glenn lowered his voice but muttered on: “Can you imagine how Ariel felt when she found it in the attic? Why, the kid expected, of course, it would be the first thing her eyes would light on at Wild Acres. And instead she had to start a hunt for it! It goes beyond imagination that anybody could do such a thing to it, even after Joan Nevin had sniffed. Couldn’t Hugh stand up to one little sniff? If he had, he’d be in a beautiful position of I told you so now!”
“Hugh’s all right,” Anne defended him. “He appreciates Ariel herself, at any rate. And that takes taste. More than I had. I had to be knocked down to wake up to it. But I can’t understand what was the matter with Joan. It seems incredible.”
Glenn didn’t notice Anne’s ambiguous allusion to having been knocked down. It was her implied opinion of the genuineness of Joan’s taste which interested him.
“You forget,” he pointed out, with a decided sneer in his voice, “that no Michael Schwankovsky had spoken authoritatively on him yet, and Clare wasn’t famous, when Joan had the privilege of first seeing this masterpiece of his. If anything ever showed that old girl up, this business does. She’s a four-flusher, that’s what she is, a kowtower, a sheep, a total washout. If she had any taste, even if she personally detested Clare’s way of painting, she’d have known this was important. Just as I detest D. H. Lawrence’s stuff, but even without the critics to tell me I’d sense he was genuinely a great writer. I hope I would.”